“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” - George W. Bush

Thursday, March 09, 2017

The US Media Hardly Knows Where to Begin After Revelations About US CIA Hacking and False Flag Cyber Attacks

"but we did find Russian fingerprints all over Hillary's emails. No need to read them."

Berlin not accusing Moscow of interfering in elections – German FM

Published time: 9 Mar, 2017 14:08Edited time: 9 Mar, 2017 14:23

Berlin is not accusing Russia of interfering in the electoral process in Germany and the creation of fake news, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has told a press conference in Moscow.

When asked by a reporter to comment on German media allegations that Moscow was behind the creation of fake news and alleged interference in the country’s electoral process, Gabriel said the government would not make such claims.

Speculation that Russia could allegedly influence foreign elections surfaced last year, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel claiming that Moscow might attempt to affect the 2017 general elections in Germany through cyberattacks.

“We already know that we have to deal with reports from Russia or also with cyberattacks from Russian sources or even with the reports from which we are confronted to some extent with false information,”Merkel said at a joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg in November.

“To deal with this is our daily task and therefore it… will also play a role in the elections,” she added.

Allegations of Russian involvement in the presidential race in America first emerged after the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails were published by WikiLeaks in July of last year. Offering no solid proof, the Democrats rushed to accuse the Kremlin of hacking into their computer networks and publishing sensitive information to swing the election in favor of Hillary Clinton’s Republican rival Donald Trump. Clinton also claimed that Moscow had supplied the whistleblower website WikiLeaks with emails hacked from the account of her campaign chair, John Podesta.

Moscow has denied the accusations, calling it "nonsense".

‘No information’ on CIA hacking attacks – Gabriel

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks released thousands of pages of leaked documents on Tuesday, alleging that the CIA actually used the US consulate in Frankfurt as a covert hacking base.

According to the documents, the US consulate hosts the Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe (CCIE), which carries out hacking operations across the continent as well as in the Middle East and Africa.

Regarding the WikiLeaks release, Gabriel said that any attempts to interfere in the country's communication systems, whoever they come from, are being taken “very seriously.”

The foreign minister, however, stated that Germany has no data about the CIA hackers’ alleged activities in the country.

“As for the alleged CIA hacking attempts, we do not have such information,” he said.

A German Foreign Ministry spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday that the authenticity of the documents, described as the biggest ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA, was still to be verified, and that Berlin would be in touch with Washington on the issue.

“We will initiate an investigation if we see evidence of concrete criminal acts or specific perpetrators. We’re looking at it very carefully,” a spokesman for Germany’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office said, Reuters reported.

It’s not the first time that WikiLeaks has revealed the extent and scope of US intelligence agencies’ activities in Germany.

In 2015, the whistleblowing group published three intercepts of conversations held by German Chancellor Angela Merkel recorded by the NSA, which had been apparently bugging her phones for years.

That's a laugh. Trump promised his base to repeal the ACA and replace it with the 'bestest health care plan you have ever seen, so great you won't believe it, so great you'll be saying stop it Mr. President, I can't take such a great plan. No one will lose their insurance under my plan. It will be cheaper than Obamacare. It will have all the good aspects of Obamacare and none of the bad. It will be super.'

As soon as he took office he said, 'I have told Congress to repeal Obamacare and come up with a replacement plan.'

He then spent six weeks getting orders shot down by the court and tweeting about Schwarzenegger and The Apprentice.

A few days ago, speaking of the GOP healthcare proposal he evidently adopted as his own, Trumpcare 1.1, by saying 'our' new plan is great and ready for negotiations thus buying into the 'disaster, calamity, catastrophe, incompetent, god forsaken nature of the cruel, mean insensitive Ryan initiated plan to try and clean up Obama's mess on health care'.

Negotiations? Better go easy on that one, Donald. Sean Spicer got slammed down by one of the committee chairs this morning for encroaching on his prerogatives in stating there would be an open debate allowing for amendments.

This will be fun.

Projected winners: The health companies and Big Pharma (and those that collect baksheesh from them).

[ex. Trump slammed the drug companies openly in the press, charging them with corruption and being parasites. He promised to punish them under anti-trust legislation.

The other day, after the reporters left, he told these same drug company CEOs that he planned to help them by

1. Cutting regulations.

2. Reducing taxes on earnings.

3. Ofering a huge tax breaks to CEOs and executives of these companies amounting to $ millions.

And that's the name of that tune.]

Projected losers: The little guys who bought into Trump's story that 'his' plan would be the greatest plan ever.

It is likely one thing he said will be true. No doubt these same people will be telling him, 'stop it Mr. President, I can't take' it.

“President Trump has a predisposition toward self-inflicted wounds,” writes New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd . “He proved so once again last Saturday when he claimed he had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama, and called him a ‘sick guy’ who had conducted a Watergate-style operation.”

Mr. Trump actually called Mr. Obama a “bad (or sick) guy.” But Ms. Spayd, who serves as a sort of ombudsman for the paper, is accurately reflecting conventional media wisdom that the President once again blundered with a misguided tweet that cannot possibly be true and is bound to hurt him politically.

It’s difficult to evaluate Mr. Trump’s claim without public evidence, just as it’s difficult to evaluate the claims by Mr. Trump’s adversaries that his campaign colluded with the Russian government in the absence of public evidence. But Mr. Trump’s latest alleged Twitter disaster seems to have put the Times on the defensive.

“Several readers have written in this week saying they’re having a hard time squaring The Times’s own past reports of wiretapping with the paper’s assertions that there is no firm evidence that any warrants for wiretaps have been issued,” writes Ms. Spayd. “Readers also expressed confusion with The Times’s assertion that it would be illegal for a White House to receive information about such investigations, when its own wiretapping story in January said the Trump White House was given some information from intercepted communications,” she adds.

The Times is a newspaper that has spent years explaining the intelligence tools used by our government, for example publishing a 2006 story despite pleas from our government not to let terrorists know how the United States tracks their finances. The Times has explored the myriad ways Washington’s powerful intelligence-collection capabilities could be abused and now finds itself in the odd position of reassuring the public that the man who led our government was surely not involved in any investigation related to his political adversaries.

“Distinguishing between Trump’s assertions and The Times’s reporting is essential. Yet readers at this juncture may be understandably confused on what is true and not in one of the most important ongoing news stories in the country,” writes Ms. Spayd. “On the surface, there are similarities. Both The Times and Trump have referred to wiretaps. Both have referenced White House knowledge of the investigations. And both have described efforts by officials from the Obama administration to involve itself in the continuing investigations of Trump and Russia,” she adds.

This would normally suggest that reporters at the Times would be looking up the chain of command to see where exactly the buck stopped in the Obama Administration. But Ms. Spayd notes that the Times position is that “Obama himself was not involved.”

One would also expect a vigorous effort to explore whether there was any abuse of federal data-gathering powers if the feds were examining Mr. Trump’s associates or former associates. Ms. Spayd reports that she checked in with the paper’s Washington bureau to figure out how wiretaps could have been conducted when according to the paper’s reporting no warrants had been issued. “Elisabeth Bumiller, the bureau chief, said the January story was referring to information picked up from wiretaps and other intelligence collected overseas, a process that requires no warrants,” writes Ms. Spayd.

Does this mean the Times is now comfortable with at least some forms of warrantless wiretapping that yield information on American citizens? Judging by Ms. Spayd’s report, many Times readers are not comfortable with this story and would like to know what exactly our government did to the party out of power and who authorized it.

Knowing Mr. Bob's propensity for dropping his crap here and refusing to go back and pick it up, I repeat this post from the last stream...

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QuirkThu Mar 09, 01:40:00 PM EST

BobThu Mar 09, 03:12:00 AM ESTQuirk should love Pam for this kind of reporting - keeping the spotlight on government spooking -

You know what you can do with Geller and the horse she rode in under.

A.G LYNCH SIGNED OFF ON ALL FISA APPLICATIONS TO WIRETAP TRUMPConservative Byte, March 7, 2917:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch would be the key cog in the machinery to enable a President Obama desire to wiretap Donald Trump...

Of course, Lynch would have signed off on the FISA applications IF there were any there there. Duh.

The rest of the article is simply a repost of an equally inane article from gatewaypundit the bulk of it taken up once again explaining the FISA process. How many times have we had that same process explained to us in the last 5 days? It’s fluff, filler meant to lend an air of authenticity for the credulous, it’s trinkets for the natives, bullshit and bubblegum, a moving light designed to distract the sheeple.

Geller’s Score:

+1 (for stating the obvious)

-10 (for a bullshit headline and dumb shit analysis)

-25 (for the distracting filler that takes up 95% of the article)

-1000 (for animal cruelty)

Ex-hick Bob’s Score:

-100,000 (for associating Quirk’s name in any way with this crap. Again.)

Don’t get me involved with this stuff again until Donald Trump takes it seriously enough to have one of his minions get on the phone with DOJ and ask them to bring him proof that...

1. A FISA warrant was requested to investigate Trump or the Trump campaign by the Obama administration (dates, times, who requested it.)

2. The warrant(s) was granted.

3. Actual wire-tapping was done either under warrant or by some other means.

Two students at Pitzer College have demanded white women stop wearing hoop earrings, claiming that they “belong to the black and brown folks who created the culture.”

The student newspaper, the Claremont Independent, reported yesterday that a message spray-painted on the college’s free-speech wall said, “White Girl, take off your hoops!!!”

In a campus-wide email, Alegria Martinez of the Latinx Student Union elaborated on the message, saying she painted it with other women of color who were “tired and annoyed with the reoccuring [sic] theme of white women appropriating styles.”

Martinez said that hoop earrings come “from a historical background of oppression and exclusion,” and that they are worn, along with winged eyeliner and lip liner, as “an everyday act of resistance, especially here at the Claremont Colleges.”

Jacquelyn Aguilera, who will not graduate for another two years, also presumes that she has the right to say who can and cannot wear hoop earrings.

“If you didn’t create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalization, take off those hoops,” Aguilera wrote in an email to her fellow students. “If your feminism isn’t intersectional take off those hoops, if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops, if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops, if you can’t pronounce my name or spell it … take off those hoops/ I use ‘those’ instead of ‘your’ because hoops were never ‘yours’ to begin with.”

As for their historical claims, Martinez and Aguilera are wrong: Hoop earrings have spanned diverse cultures. The New York Metropolitan Museum’s collection alone includes Sumerian hoops created between 2500-2600 B.C., Egyptian hoops possibly as old as 1981 B.C., Frankish hoops that date between 675-725 A.D., 6th or 7th century Byzantine or Langobardic hoops likely made in Italy, 8th century Indonesian hoops, 11th century Iranian hoops, and dozens more.

In other words, the earrings have been worn across eras and cultures, by oppressors and the oppressed alike. No culture has a monopoly on hoops. In fact, to claim such a monopoly may be closer to cultural appropriation.— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Steamboat Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum.

$80,000 is a drop in the bucket. They give that much out to most doctors in free samples and paid trips to seminars in touting their latest wonder drugs.

You talk about anecdotal goodwill (which they also write off) while they charge users in the US (their biggest market) multiple times what they charge users in other countries for the same drug. The reason? Because they can. Because they have one of the biggest lobbies in the US.

Their excuse? Someone has to pay for our research. Shit, they spend multiple times their costs for research just in marketing and advertising. I know, I've got relatives in the industry with the drug companies and those who they bribe with their gifts in the medical field.

The same guys Trump is offering additional tax breaks to are the same guys making 4 hundreds of millions in pay and stockl options.

Of the rising healthcare prices the GOP is now screaming about, about 1/3 is comes from drug prices. Just as Obamacare did nothing to stop the rising prices there, the GOP plan does even less.

You guys are suckers if you think these guys are doing anything out of the kindness of their hearts.

As it turns out 3 ISIS members were arrested in Germany on suspicion of the act but my point still applies.

As does this from the the last stream for Bob...

BobThu Mar 09, 08:10:00 AM ESTIF A NAIL IS BENT, IT MUST BE STRAIGHTENED WITH THE BLOW OF A HAMMER

Comment on Hindu child rearing practices from:

Dying To Wake Up

THIS is the very idea I have entertained concerning our child Smirk all these years...the little dude needs a good thrashing...

(tee hee hee)

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QuirkThu Mar 09, 02:08:00 PM EST.

If it wasn't India, Bob wouldn't be giggling. If it were Pakistan, he'd be calling it child abuse.

It's how he views all such issues, from a skewed and bigoted perspective. The idea of the parallax view alludes him.

In this, he is like the rat when he insisted on concentrating on Israeli abortion figures, the presence of slavery in the country, prostitution, etc. while providing no context or a relative basis on which to judge.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.